1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording apparatus, a recording system, and a method of controlling a recording apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to a recording apparatus, a recording system, and a method of controlling a recording apparatus that has a plurality of types of interfaces.
The present invention can be applied to all of the apparatuses that perform recording using paper, cloth, leather, non-woven cloth, OHP (overhead projector) sheets, etc., further on metal, etc., as a recording medium. Specifically, the apparatuses to which the present invention can be applied include business equipment, such as a printer, a copying machine, a facsimile, etc., and industrial production machinery and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, personal computers, word processors, facsimile machines, etc., have become widespread in offices and homes, and thus printers of various recording methods have been developed as information output devices for these pieces of equipment. Among these various printers, printers using an ink-jet method have advantages in that the printers can easily allow color recording, have a low noise at operation time, enable high-quality recording on various recording media, have a small size, and so on. Thus, the printers are best suited for personal use in offices and homes. Among ink-jet printers, ink-jet recording apparatuses (in the following, referred to as “recording apparatuses” or “printers”) of serial scanning type, which record data while a recording head is reciprocally scanning on a recording medium, are widespread in the market, because the apparatuses allow the printing of high-quality images at a low cost.
Also, the types of the interfaces between recording apparatuses and host computers have increased together with the widespread use of recording apparatuses. For interfaces, there are wired, wireless, and furthermore, serial communication, parallel communication, infrared data communication and the like. Thus, there are apparatuses having a plurality of interfaces of different types. For example, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2001-75765, a structure of an ink-jet printer having an infrared-data communication interface and capable of receiving data by wireless communication has been disclosed.
However, the amount of data to be printed is on the rise, because data becomes high resolution, high quality, multicolored, etc. Also, since a printer engine itself works at a higher speed, the amount of data to be transferred is also on the rise. In these circumstances, in order to deal with a plurality of interfaces, there arises a problem in the differences of individual transfer rates.
For example, the data size that can be transferred without a problem using a high speed interface, such as an interface conforming to the USB (universal serial bus) standards version 2.0, is sometimes too large for the transfer rate of a low speed interface (for example, the BT (Bluetooth) standards) to handle the processing speed of a printer engine. In this manner, if the data transfer cannot handle the processing, data waiting occurs in the printer, and results in longer print time. That is to say, in a serial printer, a start of a scan is related to the reception of data to be recorded at the next scan, and thus if the data transfer cannot handle the processing, a state of waiting for the reception of the data to be used for the recording occurs. If such a state of the data waiting occurs, preliminary ink ejection increases in order for the nozzles to be maintained in a good state for printing, which increases the waste ink at the same time. Also, it is known that color irregularities occur by the influence of time difference from the ink-penetration mechanism on the recording medium. If the time intervals between scans change at random by the data waiting described above, color irregularities might occur.
On the other hand, it becomes possible to prevent the occurrence of a waiting state at the time of using an interface having a low speed transfer rate by simply reducing the number of grayscales in order to decrease the amount of data. However, this results in significant degradation of image quality when a low speed interface is employed. Also, if a design is carried out by reducing the number of grayscales so as to adjust to a low speed interface, a problem might occur in that high-quality images cannot be recorded using a high speed interface.